


I Think I Can Manage

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [207]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Brief Physical Contact, Fantasy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 03:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17035841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: It starts because Stark can’t keep his hands to himself.





	I Think I Can Manage

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Brief brushes of contact either deliberate or accidental; thighs brushing under a table; comic physical entanglements; someone gripping a wounded character's hand. Prompt from this [generator](http://bleep0bleep.tumblr.com/prompts).

It starts because Stark can’t keep his hands to himself.

They’re sitting in some damn meeting or other with the hospital’s board of directors and Bucky can see that Tony’s nervous, the kind of nerves he never shows in the ER or the OR or any place that puts a scalpel and someone’s life in his hands. No, this is tap dance time, make nice with the money guys time, the people whose philanthropy (read: tax write-offs) puts both food on their tables and blue-blooded names on each fancy new wing. Why Tony’s there as the head of Emergency Medicine, Bucky totally gets, but why he’s here is a lot less clear. Sure, he’s Stark’s #2, his aide de camp and favorite partner in the surgical suite, but he knows jack shit about talking to rich people, to serious people, to people who take being rich very seriously.

“You won’t have to say a word,” Stark had promised him on the way up, his hands flexing on the folders he had clutched to his chest. “Just sit there and look vaguely like you’re paying attention. You can do that, right?”

Bucky’d made a face, made sure Stark could see it in the mirrored sheen of the doors. “I think I can manage.”

“Good,” Stark had said. “Then let’s go with that.”

30 minutes into the meeting, though, and Bucky is starting to drift. He’s been on shift for almost 18 hours and the chairs up on the top floor are damn comfortable, too comfortable for people who no doubt sit around conference tables like this all day, ordering their underlings about and making multi-million dollar decisions over super-fancy espresso and lunches that people who say _yes, sir_ have to fetch. This is a chair that belongs downstairs in the doctors’ lounge--minus the wheels, maybe--tucked in beside the old spongey cots because this motherfucker is padded, this motherfucker is _soft_ , this motherfucker is molding to his body like this is their third date and he paid for dinner and maybe, maybe if he closes his eyes just a touch, just for a second, nobody will pay him any mind.

“Are you sleeping?!” Stark hisses. “Goddamn it, Barnes, quit it!”

“Not sleeping. Resting.”

“What’d I say about paying attention? Jesus, I ask for one simple thing and you--”

“Dr. Stark,” someone says--ah, the woman at the head of the table, Bucky groks. He squints at her nameplate again: it reads _Ms. Potts_. “Did you have something you wanted to add?”

Stark freezes. “Ma’am?”

The woman brushes her long red hair from her face and sends them both an eyebrow. “You and your associate, you have something you wish to say about the memory garden reopening next month?”

“The--?” Stark says, and for a moment, Bucky can’t keep the grin off his face. He can’t remember the last time he saw his boss, famous loudmouth, so perfectly dumbstruck. “Ah, no, ma’am. No. Thank you.”

Everyone at the table is looking their way, a dozen sets of curious eyes watching Stark’s face turn cherry red. “Well then,” Ms. Potts says, “if no one else has a contribution--no?--then we’ll move on to your part of the agenda, Dr. Stark. I understand that you have some concerns about the state of the ambulance bay?”

Suddenly, under the table, there’s a hand on Bucky’s knee, squeezing, a grip so tight that it transcends the folds of his white coat and bears straight down to his jeans. It takes him a half-step to realize that it’s Stark; another to keep his face still; one more to throw his gaze his boss’s way: the look of _oh shit_ is gone, replaced by a mask of iron will that’s much more familiar. It’s the one Stark wears when there’s some godawful accident on the interstate and the ER gets flooded; or when a child comes in with injuries that make even the nurses go white: resolute, this face is, firm and unfucking afraid.

Never mind that Stark’s treating his knee like a stress ball beneath the table--above it, where the rest of the world can seen, Stark the iron man is in business and Ms. Potts and her ilk, Bucky thinks with no small shot of pride, better look out.

“The state of our ambulance bay,” Stark says, dry as ice, “is--if you’ll pardon me saying so, folks--a goddamn disgrace.”

In seven minutes, he’s laid out the problem; in ten, he’s sketched out a solution; and by the time another five has gone by, three quarters of the table is nodding and even Ms. Potts looks somewhat impressed.

“See?” Stark says on the way down, vibrating like a kid on caffeine. “That’s how you have to talk to those kinds of people, Barnes. Straightforward, no bullshit. Doesn’t hurt if you swear some. Makes ‘em feel like they’re part of the team. Which they aren’t, of course. They’re goddamn bureaucrats who faint at the sight of blood. But never remind of that.”

So it’s a good outcome, sure, but the problem remains: why did Stark want him there?

“You could ask him,” Steve says later over chicken breast and green leaves. “Crazy, I know. But faster than guessing.”

Bucky shrugs and reaches for his longneck. Takes one last pull that’s long and sweet. “Eh, I could. But I feel like I’d be letting him down. I feel like he expects me to know.”

Steve’s smile is sneaky and sharp. “Yeah, and god forbid you disappoint the great Dr. Stark, huh?”

“Shut up,” Bucky says, ignoring the heat in his ears. “Babe, leave the dishes. Get over here. I missed you all fucking day.”

Steve sends him to the shower and then licks him open until he’s boneless, until he’s sure he’s gonna sink through the sheets, and only when his mouth moves with no sound does Steve shove into him, smother him, stretch out over his tired-but-still-riled-up body and fuck him just right.

“I love it when you’re like this,” Steve murmurs in his ear, that voice an endless cocky grin. “When you feel so good that you can’t even say it, can you, honey? Can’t form a damn word.”

Bucky’s eyes are open and all he can see and smell and hear is Steve, taste is Steve, needs is Steve and yet when he gets a hand on his dick and makes the turn towards home his idiot brain seizes on Tony Stark’s face, on that deer in the headlights look--the big man brought for a second to heel--and he imagines for a split perfect second that it’s Stark’s hand on his knee now, Stark who’s spreading him open, Stark who’s pinning him down and filling him up and he comes with a jolt, a swallow of shock, heat slipping over his fist as Steve growls and bites at his neck and oh, Bucky thinks, his thoughts a mess of spunk and sweet, stupid confusion: oh shit.


End file.
